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When people talk about managing communities in this new online world, one name is mentioned more often and with more respect than any other: Heather Champ of Flickr . Today Champ announced that after nearly 5 years and more than 4 billion photos uploaded, she is leaving Flickr to start a community management consultancy called Fertile Medium . Flickr went from a Canadian social gaming company in 2004 to a photo sharing service to a Yahoo! acquisition in 2005. 3 years ago next month, Yahoo! shut down its giant Yahoo! Photos service and moved everyone over to Flickr instead. Sponsor Champ put her work in perspective on a blog post that included the following: "How do you take a community the size of small town to the size of a nation? How do you grow a site that began in one region and make it truly global by adding languages and localizing in what's now 25 countries? How do you apply a content filtering system to a living site to ensure that members can be respectful of one another but still share the greatest variety of content? These are some of the big hairy challenges." Just as most of Yahoo! has, Flickr has seen budget challenges as well. A substantial number of the Flickr team members were laid off one year ago this month . Facebook has long been larger and now sees almost an entire Flickr's-worth of photos (3 billion) uploaded to that social network every month. As Facebook pushes its users more and more public with their content, it would be well served by paying attention to what Champ did at Flickr. The succinct and oft-learned from community guidelines at Flickr are among the work that Champ says she has been most proud of. Those challenges were experienced at Flickr in some of the earliest days of what's now called "social media" and Champ helped forge best practices that have served as a foundation for communities all over the web ever since. Photo by Beth Kanter. Discuss
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Flickr's Community Manager Says Goodbye
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Back in January, a healthy comment discussion followed a post in which we looked at the topic of "spec work," or freelance work done for a client before an agreement of compensation is formed. One of the most vocal opponents to spec work is Andrew Hyde of TechStars and StartupWeekend fame, whose blunt opinions sparked a debate over how a marketplace for freelance work should properly function. Today, Hyde and a few friends are launching Pick , a marketplace and directory that connects clients with freelancers. Sponsor Freelancers in fields like design, development, photography, copywriting, marketing and management can sign into Pick and create a profile to share their portfolio and contact information. More importantly, however, Pick asks freelancers to list their work availability and a price range. This allows clients to narrow their search to find freelancers in the specialty they need based on location, availability and price. "The [freelance] process is a mess. There are a ton of freelancer sites out there, but freelancers never promote them because they largely exploit the community. I thought there had to be a better way," Hyde told ReadWriteWeb. "I wrote my solution and said someone should build it, and nobody did, so here we are." Through the creation of Pick and the growth of its community, Hyde hopes to put a dent in other marketplaces which he says are providing platforms for what he calls " exploitsourcing ." With a 2008 post titled "Spec Work Is Evil / Why I Hate CrowdSpring ," and in 2009's " An Open Letter to 99designs ," Hyde has become a leading voice in the movement against spec work and the services he believes promote it. "It is a major ethical flaw of both parties," said Hyde of spec work in 2008. "Some designers I have talked to have escalated this lack of ethics to be on par with some very serious crimes, while other see it as dumping oil down a rain drain. A lot of people don't take this lightly at all." On the bright side of the negativity surrounding spec work, Hyde has channeled his passion against the practice into a new place for clients and freelancers to meet without the worry of exploitation. For startups that need design, copywriting or other freelance services, Pick could soon become an excellent alternative to the more common marketplaces. Having just launched, the service is a bit of a ghost town and is currently invite-only, but Hyde hopes to see around 1,000 users by week's end. Freelancers can request an invite and clients can currently visit the site and browse the available profiles. Discuss
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TechStars' Andrew Hyde Launches Freelance Marketplace Startup
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This SAP story is getting a bit more interesting. Today we sat in in on a call with its team over at StreamWork , the new collaboration, SaaS service, previously known as 12Sprints. Dave Meyer lead the discussion. For the first time, at least for us, he helped crystalize how SAP will extend its relevancy. Meyer and his team were joined by StreamWork partners -- a curious mix of companies that include Scribd, Evernote and Box.net , not exactly the trio you'd expect to show up as partners with SAP. Sponsor The story is not entirely without its bumps. We found a few but that's not so surprising. We had trouble accessing the platform using a Google Chrome browser. It worked fine in Firefox. You can make fixes bit easier in a SaaS environment. Feedback comes in, the code gets a touch up and a new change is made. That's a bit of a different approach for SAP. It leads to the possibility that SAP is shifting its efforts by using a SaaS platform as a window to its deep back end, specifically Business Objects. SAP is taking an open-source approach. It integrates with Google Open Social and can pull in data from third-party source using RESTful web services. Google Open Social serves as a platform for tools that can be used within the framework of the StreamWork product. For example, an OpenSocial gadget to do polls may be used to get quick answers for team members. That's one way to be relevant n a new age of web-oriented technologies and continued emergence of forceful, open-source competitors, both on-premise and the cloud. The direction does seem right. the StreamWork platform could serve as a front end to the enormous SAP program libraries that companies keep on-premise. For now, though, the integration is relatively simple and not yet really defined. We received this statement from SAP after the call when we asked about access to SAP applications through StreamWork: "People will begin to see some initial integrations SAP's Developer Network, which should preface some additional capabilities to come. While we can't share granular plans, SAP has full intentions to integrate StreamWork into existing business applications. Users should see these developments over the next year. It also is up to customer feedback to prioritize which comes first, SAP has many integrations in the works and will determine which to pursue based on customer need." But the philosophy seems correct. But how do Scribd, Evernote and Box.net fit in? In a web-oriented world, static files can be a glut, obstructing the work flow. Scribd serves as viewer for accessing those important documents that may be deep in the enterprise but are still largely relevant. Evernote is one of those products that is pretty much designed for the individual, not the enterprise. It's for taking notes, pictures or any item that a community member wishes to post into a StreamWork activity. Box.net provides the storage capabilties for documents that can be shared with different groups. Folders store documents that can be uploaded and shared within a real-time environment. We spent some time using the StreamWork platform today. It is designed to drive business decisions. It's not for playing around. This is definitely its differentiator. You can see as a collaborative service and the potential deeper SAP environment. The story is coming together. The product is in its early stages. We'll now see how it does fits with the rest of the vast SAP applicaton suite. Discuss
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Does StreamWork Give a Picture of SAP's Future?
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In our poll last week, we asked: "Does it Really Matter How Cloud Computing Is Defined? " This week, we want to know: "Is Oracle a cloud company?" The questions have some relationship as how we defien cloud computing has some impact on the way we view a company and its overall vision. As for the overall debate, most of our respondents to last week's question agreed with the RedMonk team on this one. The number one response : "It's simple. Just think of cloud computing as servers, middleware and apps." The interest in this topic is shifting. About 100 or so people responded to the poll, compared to past polls that have had more than 1,000 votes. Maybe the more legitimate question should be: " Does it NOT matter at all how cloud computing is defined?" Sponsor
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Weekly Poll: Is Oracle a Cloud company?
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I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. Based on this work, I've been able to draw a few conclusions. First, a good percentage of entrepreneurs don't bother validating their ideas. Another percentage are immediately interested in raising money. Raising money without validating the business is pretty much impossible. If we can address some of these patterns we have a chance at significantly reducing infant entrepreneur mortality. At this morning's roundtable I worked with four new entrepreneurs, and this is what I learned. Sponsor Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy . She has a masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three books, Entrepreneur Journeys , Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction , and Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market are all available from Amazon. Her new book Vision India 2020 was recently released. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative. Mel Marten presented ClaroConnect , described as being like a match.com for financial advisors and clients. There was a discussion about the best way to monetize the business, whether charging an annual fee is preferred to monetizing every lead. Then the conversation turned to affiliate marketing. Albert Santalo with CareCloud was next. This Internet-based service simplifies the many tasks of the modern medical office. While this business has been validated by a growing list of clients, the positioning of their service needs to be more sharply defined in order to scale the business. Through much give and take, the importance of segmentation and focusing on the strongest segment of their market was emphasized. Martin Linkov presented Favit , a product aiming to personally curate and simply present online content. As a blogger and potential customer, I said I am looking for a service to curate and prioritize what other bloggers are saying about a topic I am blogging about to give my readers a fuller perspective. But Martin is not looking to answer that need. He demonstrates how difficult it can be to explain a complex service, while being pressed to succinctly define who the user is for this service, and what is the value proposition for the bloggers who are the stated channel. The most valuable selling proposition for this service still needs to be defined and validated. Mark Hernandez pitched his business, After COOL Fitness . I liked this business idea, there is clearly a need to fill in as physical education and recreation programs are being cut from school budgets. Currently they are paid by grants and parents. When I learned of the lopsided ownership structure of the business, I felt Mark's main priority should be to rework the capital structure of the business while continuing to organically grow the business regionally. The roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million ( 1M/1M ). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. You can find the recording of this roundtable session here . Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here . You can register for the next roundtable here . Photo by Laurent Cottier . Discuss
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Startup Strategy Roundtable: Validate Your Ideas
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